Provocative films, angry riots: the downside of new media

After this week’s violence in the Middle East, two things are
apparent. First, a lot of Arabs in the region believe that “the United
States” created a video mocking the Prophet Mohammed. And second, a lot
of people in North America believe that “Egypt” and “Libya” attacked
U.S. diplomatic outposts and killed an American ambassador.

Few protesters in Cairo or Benghazi believed that the video Innocence of Muslims
could have been created by a largely unknown group of anti-Muslim
activists in California, a group so obscure that it took U.S. reporters
more than a day to identify them – or that this network of bigots could
be allowed to exist simply because American laws protect freedom of
speech. This could only be a direct product of Washington.
After
all, this was, until recently, how things worked in their own countries.
If something was allowed to exist in Egypt or Libya, the authoritarian
government must have encouraged it to exist. Ergo, this wasn’t some
fringe oddball in California offending them; it could only have been the
United States assaulting them.

Likewise, many Americans,
including prominent ones, simply could not believe that a consulate or
embassy could be stormed by anti-American protesters without the active
consent, and likely direct involvement, of the country’s government.
These attacks prove that America has “lost Egypt” or “been betrayed by
Libya,” commentators wrote, likening this week’s relatively small-scope
protests to Iran’s 1979 revolution

We need to take three lessons from this week’s events.

The
first is that both Arab and Western citizens – and sometimes
politicians – are failing to appreciate the polyphonic nature of
democratic nations. This has always been a problem for the U.S. and its
neighbours: One-note nations such as Russia and Iran have never really
believed that every political statement, protest march and YouTube video
emerging from a diverse Western country isn’t orchestrated by the
national government.
But now it’s also a problem for the new Arab
democracies. Suddenly, they are large, and contain multitudes. They have
become polyphonic. We should not mistake the signal from the noise,
even when things become very noisy, indeed.

The second is to
realize that the new freedoms – both political and electronic – allow
the most obscure and marginal figures to dominate the agenda. ...

The third is to
realize that, as a result of this, these fringe movements are
increasingly threatening, far out of proportion of their actual numbers,
not just within their small sphere of action but on a larger stage. The
past decade has seen a largely unnoticed ascent of the circle of
xenophobic activists behind the short film that triggered this violence,
their rise into mainstream politics, and the failure of mainstream
conservatives to confront and denounce them...

This is a new, wide-open world – one whose freedoms, if we aren’t careful, can easily be seized and abused.